IS IT ALL JUST A GAME? Tom Flangan's Harper's Team

Until
the merger of the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservative
Party at the end of 2003, Stephen Harper was, to all appearances, a
straightforward conviction conservative, a somewhat wonkish neo-con with
a touch of social conservatism. Tom Flanagan was much the same, though
his social conservatism was fainter.

Harper had written the Reform Party’s policy manual, the Blue Book,
before Flanagan became that party’s director of policy, strategy and
communications in May 1991. They have worked together, more often on
than off, ever since, as Harper pursued his course to 24 Sussex Drive. Harper's Team
is largely an account of four campaigns in which Flanagan worked for
Harper: the Canadian Alliance leadership in 2002, the Conservative Party
leadership in 2004, and the general elections of June 2004 and January
2006. The team is a score or more behind the scenes workers who are, and
will mostly remain, unknown to all but the keenest politics fans, most
notable Ken Boessenkool, the young economist turned lobbyist who played a
key role in policy and strategy in all four campaigns.

Flanagan
has been a professor of political science at the University of Calgary
since 1968, one of the many Americans hired by Canadian universities
during the great university boom of the sixties. Outside his political
role he is best know as a critic of conventional and official thinking
on native rights and the role of Louis Riel in Canada’s history. But it
is one of the claims of political science to understand what makes
people vote the way they do, the same claim made by political
strategists who work for politicians. Never active in politics before he
went to work for the Reform Party, Flanagan came late to what is often a
young man’s game. Some start in their teens. But he took to it with an
enthusiasm that is evident throughout Harper's Team.
It is a lively, sometimes dramatic, account of campaigning from the
nuts and bolts of hiring buses, designing posters and renting office
space to the crafting and communication of policy and responding to
opponents’ attacks and the inevitable ‘events’. Flanagan is naively
excited by the use of computers and the web for campaigning. If his
dreams were fulfilled there would be no escaping it.

Harper’s Reform Party Blue Book
was a thoroughly conservative document. Flanagan had a reputation as a
conservative in an uniquely conservative political science department.
He says he was attracted to the Reform Party by the Blue Book. As recounted in Waiting for the Wave,
his 1995 book on Preston Manning and the Reform Party, Flanagan split
with Manning, he was actually fired, because Manning was preparing to
move beyond conservatism, hiring the former Liberal strategist Rick
Anderson, and soft-pedalling Reform’s conservative message. In
Flanagan’s image, Manning caught the wave of Western alienation and
anxiety about the deficit and taxes but had no commitment to
conservatism as he waited for the next wave that he hoped would carry
him to 24 Sussex Drive. Manning, the most devious of politicians, has
always been happy to let those who want him to be a conservative think
that he is, but, outside of his domestic life, he has never been a
conservative. In the founding of the Canadian Alliance, while
enthusiasts hoped to unite the right, Manning promoted a United
Alternative, embracing even weary New Democrats.

Stephen
Harper had solidified his reputation as a conservative as Reform’s most
articulate policy voice in the Commons before resigning in 1997 to lead
the “More freedom through less government” National Citizens Coalition.
What could be more conservative than that? He was on the sidelines as
the Canadian Alliance was formed at cross-purposes between a united
right and a united alternative. When Stockwell Day had to step down
Harper campaigned for the leadership as the True Reformer: True
Conservative, sceptical of his rivals’ keenness to treat with the
Progressive Conservatives. When he engineered the merger of the Alliance
and the PCs the name Conservative Party of Canada, while comforting old
Tories, seemed to confirm that the new party would be the real thing.

The
media eagerly promoted an image of Harper and Flanagan as neo-cons with
a mission. A high point was Marci McDonald's paranoid “The Man behind
Stephen Harper” in the October 2004 Walrus.
The Liberals gleefully depicted Harper as frighteningly conservative
and dismissed any sign of moderation or pragmatism as evidence of a
hidden agenda. Harper's Team shows what Harper in office confirms, that he and his team are no more frightening or conservative than Joe Clark.

Flanagan
occasionally piously affirms conservative principles but he makes it
plain that his concern and Harper’s was always simply to win campaigns.
In this context policy is not a basis for governing but an election tool
like a leader’s tour or an advertising campaign. Whether a platform
plank is good government on conservative or any principles is not even a
consideration. Its only importance is its effectiveness in moving
voters, the most shameless example the GST cuts, the most embarrassing
the promise not to tax income trusts.

By
Flanagan’s account elections are won and lost, lost in 2004, won in
2006, by all the elements of the campaign, of which policy is only a
part, pitched against the other parties’ campaigns. This is the proud
conviction of political insiders, the multi-partisan confraternity of
political activists, government relations consultants, pollsters and
political staffers, endorsed by the many journalists who are their
frequent interlocutors. But the results in 2004 and 2006 can be
explained without a thought for the campaigns. The immensely prestigious
Paul Martin was expected to sweep the country when he became Prime
Minister. The Adscam revelations kept him to a minority but voters were
uneasy about the little known Stephen Harper. In 2006 Martin had shown
himself to be a feckless Prime Minister, the Gomery Commission had
displayed all the rot in the Liberal Party and Stephen Harper had come
to be known as an ordinary politician, not exciting but not frightening,
worth a try. The shift in Quebec, not the result of a beefed up
Conservative campaign in that province but of the historically familiar
shift to a rising Conservative party, the pointlessness of the Bloc, and
the shabby disarray of the Liberals, was enough to give Harper his
minority government rather than a virtual tie with the Liberals.

Fans of the game of politics will enjoy Harper's Team.
Canadians still anxious about a hidden agenda should read it to set
their minds at rest. But it is disturbing in a different way. It
illustrates how the political game, campaigning, has come to overwhelm
politics, whose end is government.

Flanagan
says that “Campaigning is an audition for government.” He claims that
organising and directing campaign workers, raising money and spending it
well are a test of the skills needed in government. The same could be
said of running a stamp club, planning a wedding or commanding an army.
It is an absurd analogy, which shows that the specificity of government,
the substance of politics, is lost in the political game.

Harper
has governed as if he was running a political campaign. Beyond the five
priorities coming out of the election campaign, in making appointments,
bringing forward legislation, responding to events, his government has
been hesitant, inactive, inept. Everything is, and is seen to be,
calculated to win a majority but the surest way to a majority, governing
well, eludes them because of the dominance of political players in
politics.

Flanagan
analyses the voters as given and fixed interests and identities that
must be won over by special appeals and policies. The commonweal to be
governed well disappears. There is no suggestion that public
understanding could be moved by promoting conservative or any other
principles. A Canada that elected a Conservative government would not be
a whit more conservative than it had been before.

Flanagan
may be an academic conservative. He mentions a kind of conversion
experience on reading Friedrich Hayek at the ripe old age of 35. There
is no mention of the demonised Leo Strauss. Yet his conservatism seems
academic in the pejorative sense. His former student Ian Brodie, now
Harper’s chief of staff, must also have left his academic conservatism
behind.

In
1998 Flanagan wrote with Harper “The purpose of the conservative
movement is to change public opinion and public policy.” In 2001 he
wrote “Conservatives and libertarians who see politics as a means of
effecting change in public policy are more likely to achieve their goals
by supporting parties with a consistent free-market outlook than by
submerging themselves in “big tent” parties that may sometime win
elections but have no clear agenda...” Yet his work in the 2004 and 2006
elections and his prescriptions at the end of Harper’s Team
aim precisely at a big tent party offering only scraps to conservatives
and libertarians. Scraps that the liberal media exaggerate, as they did
the recent banning of tax credits for “offensive” films.

More
than the political game’s deflection of politics from government it is
simply not well played. The wise guys who play politics are gifted with
inexhaustible self-esteem but, because they mistake their strategy and
campaigning for the substance rather than just the show of politics they
fail at their own game. They become overexcited as Flanagan admits,
most dangerously in the attempt to defeat the Martin government in May
2005. Chuck Cadman may have saved Harper from a second defeat. Flanagan
refers to his visit with Doug Finley to Cadman the afternoon before the
vote. They saw him for fifteen minutes: “...he was visibly tired, and I
could see that he wasn’t up to negotiating a return to caucus.”

Over
100 years the Liberal Party abandoned all its principles to win power
becoming experts at the game. Look at them now. Harper’s Conservatives
have learned from the Liberals. But they risk the same fate, not after
100 years but early in this century. For conservatives whose hopes were
raised in the 90’s it is a depressing prospect.

All
the skills of the team that won the 2006 election have now been
deployed for over two years to the end of winning a majority, but faced
with an historically feeble opposition there is no reason to think the
Conservatives would do any better now than they did then. There is no
reason to think a Harper majority government would be much different
from his minority. It would likely devote itself to winning another
majority at the factitiously fixed date. A majority might loosen for a
while the election ready discipline Harper has imposed and reveal what
character and thinking survives in the Conservative Party. But when
campaigning overwhelms politics it all becomes about winning, exciting
for the players and the fans but no good for the voters. As in any game
there is only one agendum, winning. If voters would not give them a
majority in 2006 for fear of a hidden agenda, they will not now because
they cannot see what would be the point.